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Australia: The Land Where Time Began |
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Aboriginal Occupation -
Populating the Continent
Nearly everything required by hunter-gathers was
provided for by the coastal environments of northern Australia - fresh
water, shelter, fire and food - the available food being in a variety of
forms, fruits, nuts, tubers, fish, shellfish, birds and their eggs,
reptiles and marsupials, which made for a secure foundation. The numbers
of marsupials, birds and reptiles were very high, which would have made
it easy for the first settlers to live off the land in the vicinity of
their first settlements until they worked out what could and could not
be eaten in the vegetation away from the landing site, the composition
of the vegetation becoming more different with distance from the coast
and rivers. At the landing site they would also have to be wary of
possible predators, but as they moved further inland they would have had
to become familiar with the large megafauna predators that inhabited any
new environments they encountered. Once they had become familiar with
the new predators they needed to find a defence against them, and the
occasional cyclone, fire or flood they needed to learn how to deal with,
life in general would probably have been relative safe and free in their
new homeland.
To colonise the new continent they needed, as would
any animal colonising a new environment, access for the men to breeding
females. It is shown by demographic simulations that in order to avoid
extinction or in-breeding at least 2 groups of about 100 individuals
each would be needed for the exchange of women to allow both groups to
achieve a stable demographic state. It is indicated by genetic analysis
that the people colonising Australia did so in a number of landings that
took place close to simultaneously, in small groups that totalled about
1,000 individuals. As the entire continent was populated in what some
suggest may have been a relatively short time, then it is obvious that
there were enough breeding women, though in some cases in very small
groups there may have been a degree of incest if women from other groups
were not available.
An open social and environmental horizon confronted
these first settlers to which they needed to adapt, breed and
consolidate, and then they could expand into the rest of the continent.
The author1 suggests the first settlement and colonisation of
the continent might have been quite fast, though he suggests northern
Australia was such a fertile environment at the time of the first
settlement that there might not have been much need for nomadism. He
also suggests that the establishment of a relatively small area may have
been encouraged by the country being foreign and fertile which may have
been a significant disincentive to extreme nomadism. On the
other hand there were few constraints on territorial expansion once a
social group was secure, as the population increased and the existing
resources became less abundant. It is suggested to be possible that an
ancient population that had steadily grown and expanded proportionately,
that was never far from water and always within reach of its own
geographic traditions, constantly sought new country to live more easily
in. A sinuous colonisation process that eventually appears to have, as
the author1 puts it, a surprising agility.
It is therefore possible to imagine a founding
population growing, their country becoming increasingly larger along the
coast, up rivers and across the savannah and on into escarpments and
hills that were well watered. When the founding population first arrived
the shores and hinterland where they settled, which is now under water,
was a landmass that was greater in area than the present day Northern
Territory and twice the size of New South Wales. It was a large area and
would appear to have been a large area for the settlers and their
descendants to colonise, though it may have taken less time than is at
first believed possible. Assuming a population of 1,000 settlers, and
that population was comprised of family groups each of about 20 people
who had a territorial configuration similar to that of coastal
Arnhem Land
at the present, and a population growth of 1-2.5 %/year, the entire
coastal plain, that is now submerged, could have been populated in
400-900 years.
If this is correct it would have been possible that
a founding population arriving in Australia 70,000-50,000 BP could have
settled the entire coastal plain, now submerged, in a period that was
too short to be detected by even the best of the modern dating
techniques, being in that sense instantaneous. But as people are social
beings with a strong sense of place, to the extent that people are
dependent on their society and their society is dependent on the country
it is attached to, then these people are partially geographically
contained. The necessity for territorial expansion is opposed to the
need for a unified society, and such a tension is broken only under
particular environmental conditions, such as drought, or changed
conditions such as overpopulation that leads to decreased environmental
opportunity. Therefore it is difficult to predict population growth as
the ties of social adhesion bind it, and the environmental necessity
stabilised, at some point, by the relationship between them in the
context of indeterminate time elements, diversity of environments, the
variability of the climate, and the evolution of the culture. The
dynamic is active, the balance is variable and there are unpredictable
demographic consequences. It is obvious that people did colonise the
entire continent, but it is less obvious what the pattern and rate of
colonisation was. Therefore it is not known if colonisation was as rapid
as is suggested by demographic modelling, or as slow as it is supposed
to be by intuition, being tentative at the start, of incremental form
and in time comprehensive, always being contextualised by human
capacity, constraints of the environment and the changing climate over
the millennia of occupation.
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Author: M.H.Monroe Email: admin@austhrutime.com Sources & Further reading |